Rice Univesrity Logo
    • FAQ
    • Deposit your work
    • Login
    View Item 
    •   Rice Scholarship Home
    • Rice University Graduate Electronic Theses and Dissertations
    • Rice University Electronic Theses and Dissertations
    • View Item
    •   Rice Scholarship Home
    • Rice University Graduate Electronic Theses and Dissertations
    • Rice University Electronic Theses and Dissertations
    • View Item
    JavaScript is disabled for your browser. Some features of this site may not work without it.

    A grammar of Matses

    Thumbnail
    Name:
    3090144.PDF
    Size:
    94.35Mb
    Format:
    PDF
    View/Open
    Author
    Fleck, David William
    Date
    2003
    Advisor
    Gildea, Spike
    Degree
    Doctor of Philosophy
    Abstract
    This dissertation is a synchronic description of the grammar of the Matses language (also know as Mayoruna; Panoan family) as currently spoken by the Matses people living in Amazonian Peru and Brazil. The Matses language is spoken by 2000--2200 people, Amerindians who were first contacted in 1969 and continue to pursue traditional subsistence practices. This is the first attempt at a comprehensive description of the grammar of Matses; full-length grammars of no other Panoan language exist. Matses phonology, morphology, and syntax are the principal topics of this work. It follows a traditional format and is organized so that it can be used as a reference. The introductory chapter briefly provides information about classification of the language (particularly the Mayoruna subgroup), demography, physical setting, history, ethnography, literature review, and methodology. The second chapter describes Matses phonology, including an inventory of distinctive segments, syllable structure, morphophonology, prosody, sound symbolism, and borrowing. The next seven chapters are on morphology (an introduction to morphology, followed by six chapters describing the morphology of nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, postpositions, and particles). All aspects of morphology are treated in these sections, including identification of word classes and subclasses, affixation, clitics, reduplication, and class-changing processes. The last three chapters are on syntax (phrases, one-clause sentences, and multi-clause sentences). The appendix contains three parsed texts. Matses has six vowels and 15 consonants. A word-level alternating rhythmic stress pattern characterizes the sound of the language. Morphologically, Matses stands between isolating and polysynthetic languages, and between agglutinative inflecting/fusional languages. It is the large number of morphological possibilities that is striking about Matses, not the length of its words. Interesting morphological properties include a complex system for coding evidentiality, an elaborate system of directional verbal suffixes, and adverb transitivity agreement. Constituent order is essentially free from syntactic restrictions. Subordination is achieved through expansion of syntactic slots though class-changing processes. Clause-chaining is a prominent feature of Matses discourse with sentences of up to ten clauses. Interesting syntax includes ergative-absolutive case marking alongside nominative-accusative person agreement, and three-place verbs with identical objects.
    Keyword
    Linguistics
    Citation
    Fleck, David William. "A grammar of Matses." (2003) Diss., Rice University. https://hdl.handle.net/1911/18526.
    Metadata
    Show full item record
    Collections
    • Rice University Electronic Theses and Dissertations [13409]

    Home | FAQ | Contact Us | Privacy Notice | Accessibility Statement
    Managed by the Digital Scholarship Services at Fondren Library, Rice University
    Physical Address: 6100 Main Street, Houston, Texas 77005
    Mailing Address: MS-44, P.O.BOX 1892, Houston, Texas 77251-1892
    Site Map

     

    Searching scope

    Browse

    Entire ArchiveCommunities & CollectionsBy Issue DateAuthorsTitlesSubjectsTypeThis CollectionBy Issue DateAuthorsTitlesSubjectsType

    My Account

    Login

    Statistics

    View Usage Statistics

    Home | FAQ | Contact Us | Privacy Notice | Accessibility Statement
    Managed by the Digital Scholarship Services at Fondren Library, Rice University
    Physical Address: 6100 Main Street, Houston, Texas 77005
    Mailing Address: MS-44, P.O.BOX 1892, Houston, Texas 77251-1892
    Site Map